Home Lane; Visitor’s Lane

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Every highway needs to have a Home Lane and a Visitor’s Lane.

I realized this a short while ago, when I saw several out-of-state plates in a row on “my” highway. There was a caravan of folks from out of town, though they weren’t all from the same place.

I’ve heard the insurance company statistics that claim certain states have worse drivers than others, but we in the states surrounding California know the real truth: California drivers are the worst. They get out of their highways that resemble Vienna Sausage cans and get to the open spaces of highways beyond their claustrophobic state, and sadly they have no idea what to do with their vehicles or all that extra spaaaaace.

Say it with me: Spaaaaace.

They keep their bad habits of tailgating and sudden lane changes and pulling ahead of you to make you slow down, even though there’s a good seventeen car gap behind you that they could have filled instead of that two car gap in front of you. This is only in reference to the California driving habit of course, and not derogatory toward the people who practice it. They could easily move out and find themselves with more civil driving habits within a year, if they tried.

One way I understood the contrast in driving habits was when I had a conversation once. This guy asked me, “What would happen if you drove 55 on that road over there?” I thought I responded honestly, “You’d run over someone.” The stretch of road he was referring to was a long line of RVs, as I remembered it; RVs filled with the geriatric who were fleeing one location to occupy another supposedly better location, the “greener grass” people, people who drove really slow so they wouldn’t spill the beans boiling on the stove in the back of the RV. But then my friend said, “No, you’d get run over.” You see, in my older friend’s eyes, everyone was going really super fast on the highway where the speed limit is 55 miles per hour—though to me, a personage slightly younger than him, everyone on that road was driving as slowly as was mechanically possible. So in that scenario, I WAS the California driver, and I should have learned some manners, some highway etiquette, and instead of forcing my way around the snail-paced RVs, I should have had a bit more patience. I should have stayed in the lane built for me.

That would be The Visitor’s Lane, if there was such a thing.

Now that I’m a bit more stationary, a local, I can claim the Home Lane. Everyone with those Guam and Cuba and Hawaii and Samoa license plates can occupy the Visitor’s Lane. Move over!

Evolution vs. Entropy

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Generally speaking, and simply to clear up any misunderstandings before they happen, evolution is another word for “steady progression”, while entropy means “deterioration”.

Mathematically, they can’t coexist in the same system. You can’t have entropy and evolution working together. They will always work against each other. One fun way to look at it is: take an imaginary company, and have one department that is working as hard as it can to make the company successful, then have another department doing its skillful best to run the company into the ground. Eventually, whichever department was strongest would win the battle. But the system, the company, would never win, unless it could somehow eliminate one of the departments. Which department it eliminated would be determined by the company’s ultimate goal: to fail or succeed. If you broke it down even further and had one employee trying to make the company better, while another employee was trying to ruin the business, then it would be so much easier to fix what was broken.

Unfortunately for us, both terms are blanket terms. Both evolution and entropy are general terms. They have subcategories and can be broken down into parts and strata that themselves can encourage or discourage evolution or entropy. Evolution can be subdivided and defined in a wide range of topics such as mechanical evolution, inter-species evolution, technological evolution, or even individual evolution. (One thing many laymen do wrong is use the general term “evolution” in place of the more specific terms. Transposing meanings is a common mistake. This makes criticism easy though, because then the critic can say you don’t know the difference between the evolution of the cart and the evolution of the horse.) Entropy can be found in substrates such as thermodynamic entropy, Martian entropy, communication entropy, and spiritual entropy.

Individuals can promote their own evolution. Some scientists wax philosophical and say the human condition is to work against entropy though nature does not.

To me, that just sounds like so much downer pessimism. As if the entropy was some universally unavoidable trait. Yet, if you watch people working their hardest to make things better, you can see that they not only postpone future degradation, but they show us how to eliminate it altogether. It’s there, if you choose to see it. It’s brighter than a Martian sunrise.

 

Big Freshwater Gulp

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As a blog post, more than a barchive, today, I’ll admit that I’m in the process (once again) of trying to secure an agent—a literary agent. Are frog’s feet lucky like rabbit’s feet? Frog legs should be lucky. What could be more lucky than a fish that grew legs?

Anyway, whatever science fiction superstition you can throw my way, please do it. I’m going to put my novels out again to see if someone can help me sell them to a publisher.

If that doesn’t work—if I get a load of rejections again—I’ll default to plan B and start pushing my screenplays through the various screenplay inlets (yes, that again too). Then we’ll have to use a different sort of superstition.

Sci-fi superstition could be like: repeat, “Beam me up Scotty,” while spinning around three times and alternately opening and closing a flip phone. Or maybe whisper, “It’s full of stars,” while banging on a black monolith with a bone. Or maybe shouting, “Moh-ah-deeb!” on the beach while crossing your fingers in front of you and doing a squat.

Whatever works. (A really professional Query Letter? No, that can’t be it. Don’t be silly.)

Screenwriter’s superstitions are easy. You just do the sci-fi superstitions only backwards, on the 13th day of the month, with every TV in your house playing something with Steven Spielberg’s or Alfred Hitchcock’s or Clint Eastwood’s influence on it.

Street Quotes

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Words overheard in public places:

 

Girl: Don’t you know what you did?

Boy: No. What was it?

Girl: If you don’t know, then I’m not telling you.

Boy: Then don’t be surprised when it happens again.

 

“You know, that thing on the thing.” —A man talking to his obviously confused companion.

 

“We’ve crossed the vast expanse.” —C. C.

 

“If I am what I eat, then I’m unhealthy and ready in two minutes.” —Jesse Crump

 

“I miss the old days, when I could insult people in person.” —A man at the 7-11, with cell phone in hand.

 

Old man (at Target): I have to go to the store.

Old woman: The store?

Old man: I mean the bank.

Old woman: This is why we don’t have any money.

 

A boy, hollering up at a girl driving a large and lifted diesel truck: “Nice bus!”

 

What I like about these street quotes is that you can give people their due—if you find out their name. Everyday people should be quoted more often than they are, and so-called famous people should be quoted less often. That’s only my opinion though, so go ahead and form your own opinion. And make your own quotes. I think it’s even perfectly fine to quote yourself. If you say something that’s worth repeating, go ahead and give yourself the line. But if you hear someone else say something clever or funny, you for sure better acknowledge them. Don’t steal other people’s stuff. That’s about as cool as dropping a road kill on the refreshment table.

Anyway, I write things down all the time, so when I hear someone say something interesting, I collect their quotes. I’m sure I’ll have more of these in the future.

Recently Read: Tom Hanks

Meticuloso5I started out liking Tom Hanks’ stories in his book titled Uncommon Type. His writing has an easy flow to it. If he enjoys writing, then it shows in his work. If he doesn’t, then he could quit and go back to acting.

His short stories (so far, I’m still reading) have a witty, humanity-conscious style that let’s you read through with little effort. His style is fairly accurate in its study of humans. Like most writers who write, Tom Hanks seems to be a people watcher. He has studied the human condition and reported it well. You’ll learn to see your fellow humans as if through the eyes of Hanks.

Where it fell apart for me, was when I noticed that the stories were going nowhere. I could skip whole sections and still get the same feeling from his writing. It’s writing for the sake of writing. (Like some ‘blogs.) When you read such stuff, it doesn’t really matter how much of it you read; you can miss a few lines, and not really lose the story line. The plot meanders.

In the first story, he manages to write about sex without using any words that start with the letter f, or going into unnecessary detail. A lesson that many beginning writers need to learn. (Of course, then he uses the infamous word that starts with the letter f in another way. So if you’re looking for stories without that word, this is not for you.)

I’d give Uncommon Type a fairly high rating on two points. First because you, like me, will probably pick up the book and think, “Tom Hanks wrote a book? Tom Hanks, the actor?” But then you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that he can write pretty well. Second, because he has a love of life that is optimistic. I choose optimism over pessimism any day of the week.

I read another book recently by an author whose name starts with b. She wrote an awful book about elephants that doesn’t need to be mentioned by name any more than it needs to be read by anyone, ever. I couldn’t even finish it, it was so putrid. Reading it was like drinking from a puddle that a thirsty dog would avoid. It was like discarded carrion. It was like the stench of an outhouse visited by polecats.

In contrast: Tom Hanks’ book Uncommon Type was like Heaven after that hellacious book about elephants.